David Jones (1895-1974), Mehefin, 1949, watercolour, bodycolour and pencil on paper, Estate of David Jones.

David Jones’s watercolour scenes are like illustrations for unwritten stories shot through with chaos. Tangled colour gradually unblurs to reveal objects and places. Reality seems to exist in diaphanous layers that shiver and twitch translucently over one another. There is simultaneously a coolness and a strange tenderness to Jones’s images, as if familiar things are only provisionally so, and should be treasured all the more for that reason. DH

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